How to Scale Content Marketing? 10 Steps to Take

In business, scaling means the possibility to show an appropriate performance under increasing level of pressure. In content marketing, it would refer to creating a system that operates efficiently without your constant supervision. When you arrange your regular activity the way it doesn’t require permanent attention, you can concentrate on more pressing issues or get a clearer understanding of where to move further.

Adsy’s prepared a list of measures you should take to stop worrying about the success of your content marketing.

10 Steps of Scaling Your Content Marketing

Step 1. Create content that is hard to duplicate

The best way to ensure that your content marketing efforts will be fruitful is to create content that stands out. Previously we’ve talked about the features good content has. We mentioned that there is a list of indicators of successful content: its length, value, visual support, proper grammar use, high level of writer’s expertise and readability, user-friendly formatting and some others. You can check out the article How to Create Quality and High-Converting Content to read about each of these in more detail. What’s more, your content has to present a unique point of view, an absolutely new angle to the problem, otherwise, it’s only going to be similar to many other posts and can easily get lost and forgotten. When you manage to write evergreen content you get a chance to automate your marketing process and concentrate more on other steps.

Step 2. Optimize your content’s discovery

The importance of search hardly drops over time, and it stays the most effective source to attract new audience and customers to your website. Learn the basics of how to help search engines discover your content by optimizing the content itself and the website as a whole. What you can do:

Structure internal links to draw traffic to as many of your website’s pages as possible

Join discussions when you can really help people and remember to mention your website

In addition, you can optimize your brand for local search if it’s applicable in your industry. As you may know, in an attempt to satisfy the users Google pays attention at local businesses when organizing its SERPs. If you happen to provide quality services in a region, don’t forget to add your business’ address to rank higher.

Step 3. Make use of the media you have access to

This includes earned, owned and paid media you’ve obtained. What are these?

Owned media are the sources at your service that have the closest relation to your brand - your website, blog, social network pages.

Paid media helps you reach out to people using various ads, sponsored posts and paid promotion channels.

Earned media are all the shares you’ve got around the Internet including reviews, mentions, and reposts.

When you optimize the media network and make it easy for people to start following your activity you improve your chances to become visible and extend your audience. This is the “marketing” part of your content marketing.

Step 4. Build intra-industry relationships

It’s almost impossible to boost content marketing performance without a network of like-minded people. They are the ones who are going to read and voluntarily share your new posts. These can be your readers as well as some influencers or other publishers.

Moreover, you may find it rather hard to search for qualified in-house writers who can reach out to a vast audience. What can come really handy here is a network of external writers. Then you could ask them to contribute or provide some benefits in exchange. If you don’t know where to start, try using Adsy’s services and search for a publisher. By ordering an article from an outsource writer you kill two birds with one stone: save your in-house writers’ time and efforts and get access to the readers you weren’t able to reach out to earlier.

Step 5. Measure and improve conversion

The most accurate way to scale your content marketing is to ensure your content conversion. Each piece of the content you produce, whether it’s a blog post or any other page on your website, has to have a clear and concise call-to-action.

In can be a CTA-button that will encourage the readers to leave their email and subscribe to your newsletter, or links to other articles on your website to make them stay longer on the site, or questions and suggestions for discussion to add readers’ involvement.

Adding tasks that demand users’ actions will also help you in measuring your content marketing performance and identify possible gaps in it.

Step 6. Work on personal branding

It is extremely useful to build a personal brand of the authors that work on your content creation. The presence of well-known writers will scale your content marketing efforts and ensure a gradual progress. You may write the content yourself or have a team of professionals to do that, but stating to the world who is behind the content is a good chance to obtain more credibility and attract new customers.

How can you improve personal branding?

Use interviews as an opportunity to promote yourself or the authors

Produce content to share in collaboration with other writers

Start a column in an industry-related blog

Demonstrate interaction by participating in forums and social network discussions

The more often people run into the writers’ names when finding answers to questions the more trust the writers will gain.

Step 7. Check your content for user- and mobile-friendliness

It’s obvious that the use of mobile devices won’t decrease with the time, and if you haven’t created a responsive design or a mobile app for your website, don’t postpone it. The following statistics are something you shouldn’t ignore when thinking about your outcomes with content marketing.

You can check Google Analytics data for your site to see the amount of mobile traffic you are getting at the moment to understand whether or not to put it on your priority list. However, we strongly recommend creating a mobile-friendly version for your site for you not to lose a share on the market.

Step 8. Reuse successful posts

And not only successful ones. Measure your content marketing efforts and when you have content that truly helps your readers, make use of it more than once. Think of some distribution channels you haven’t taken advantage of yet. Reorganize your ideas to present them once again in another form - put together an ebook, make an infographic or record a video. Your articles sequence from a blog can serve a foundation for a list of educational emails or a broadcast series.

Even if your content didn’t perform really well the first time you published it, make changes and try again. Your informative and useful article may have had a bad response from the audience because it was too long. Why not making a presentation out of it and split up the info for better comprehension?

Experiment, observe the audience’s reaction, note the findings and repurpose the content.

Step 9. Find out what’s working and do it again

Or identify which of your attempts failed and look for the reasons. Anyway, don’t neglect the analytics you receive after your content has been published. To have a better understanding of your audience’s interests analyze the engagement rate (traffic, bounce rate, time spent on a page), the number of social shares, conversion rate.

On a regular basis keep an eye on the following:

Everyday analytics to notice all real-time issues

Monthly, quarterly and yearly KPIs to understand main trends

Every complex situation to identify deep problems

Step 10. Have a plan for the future

Adapt your plans according to the findings you get from content marketing analytics and observations. Have your content marketing team adjust their efforts and make necessary changes.

To make sure all members of your team are on the same page find some time every week or so to arrange a meeting. This will help to track trends in real time and shape the content marketing short-term strategy in compliance with them. Having a far-reaching plan and a set of SMART goals is a must, but the flexibility in face of the market changes is what defines the true leaders.

Conclusion

All the steps we’ve mentioned represent a good place for your to start if you strive to have a winning content marketing and optimize your content marketing efforts. As we said, they allow you to build a substantial base for future growth and are the key to success of your next undertakings. Which tactics help you be sure your content marketing is at scale? Share with us in the comments.